Government Window: Enabling Government Agencies to Streamline e-Payment

Scott Kenney, Co-Founder

Federal, state, and local Government agencies across the nation have always struggled to diligently serve the needs of citizens while simultaneously managing operations and costs. Just like any other business in today’s digital economy, government is challenged to provide more services with less budget and fewer personnel. Agencies must continually find new ways to improve service and efficiency. Often, the lack of technical solutions frustrates disgruntled citizens standing in long lines to either make a payment or enquire about information needed to make a payment. In a recent interview with CIOApplications, the Co-founder of Government Window (GW), Scott Kenney discusses how his company is revolutionizing the government payments market. Government Window has built an Enterprise Platform focused on optimizing the collection methods for their government partners and citizens.GW is driving exponential growth by delivering technology solutions that accelerate government revenue collection while simultaneously providing superior service to their citizens. With both parents having worked in the public sector, and Scott interning at large government agencies early in his career, he witnessed first-hand the negative effects that antiquated technical solutions had relative to all parties participating in the government payments process. With an undergraduate degree in MIS and successful career implementing large ERP solutions in the private sector, Kenney realized that he wanted to streamline the challenges citizens faced when needing to make routine payments to various governmental entities. GW solely focuses on making the public sector more efficient and delivers payment solutions that save government agencies time and money. In the interview, he also talks about their product, key differentiators, and future ventures.

In your interactions with CIOs of leading companies, what sense do you get of the challenges they face and how is Government Window effectively addressing these issues with its range of service offerings?

At the highest point, from our client’s perspective, challenges lie in service level and reconciliation complexities. In a typical environment, whether it’s a county, a state or a city, there is a lack of integrated platforms leading to many disparate solutions from multiple payment vendors to manage payments for different departments within the same agency. This scenario not only makes payment collection a labor-intensive process but also leads to higher cost of collection as well as accounting errors. Additionally, this makes it almost impossible for office personnel to detangle the complexities of multiple solutions related to back-end processes for reconciliation. Even the basic tasks of answering queries, tracking customer information, and collecting payments from citizens is a tedious and error-prone process, which invariably lead to a highercost.

Could you walk us through your solution portfolio based on its methodology and benefits involved?

The best way to eliminate the challenges related to traditional payment methods is to create a system that electronically and accurately captures all data required in a timely fashion and facilitates transactions in any environment and via any payment channel, which is where we come in.

The GOVERNMENTWINDOW^® payment process is a singular cross department solution for all Credit/ Debit Card and eCheck payments streamlining collections and reducing administrative functions. Government agencies everywhere collect more money and collect it faster with GOVERNMENTWINDOW^®

Our enterprise platform is built to facilitate electronic payment processes and provide timely and accurate information that citizens require to make payments. We can do that in three ways: Online, Over the Phone, and Walkup Payments. With online payments, our portal can integrate seamlessly with a government organization’s existing back office software to create a seamless integrated solution. A link or icon on the agency’s existing website, when accessed by an end user can directly lead citizens to our portal where they can search for any payment obligation data and make a payment using a credit/debit card or electronic check. GW can provide this same level of integration for all payment types across all departments to reduce confusion and improve efficiency. All payments made via the GW portal directly post back into the customers accounting system to enable real-time payment identification and reconciliation. Our solution also includes a NO-COST toll-free telephone number that allows a caller to easily retrieve information or make a secure payment with a touch-tone phone. This Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system supports both English and Spanish, provides easy access to a live operator, and has proven to reduce call volume into our client’s office by up to 40 percent.

Our Point-of-Sale solution provides the same capabilities to facilitate walk-up payments. GW provides all equipment needed to facilitate walk up payments completely free of charge to our government partners. GW also assumes all PCI risk and responsibility associated with credit card acceptance on behalf of our government clients.

The city of Gainesville, Georgia needed to transform the way citizens made payments and interacted with the government into a simpler and less expensive process. GW implemented our single vendor integrated enterprise solution to provide a consistent, comprehensive solution across all departments. As always, our solution was provided at zero costs to the government agency while providing a simple affordable time saving solution to its citizens. Gainesville quickly realized the benefits associated with our platform. Having started with business licenses and permits, they rapidly decided to expand to all city departments and payment types. The ease of integration and configuration of the GW solution allowed them to do this on an accelerated timeline that minimized disruption to prior routine and maximized value for both the city and citizen. Using GW for all city payments has allowed the city of Gainesville to eliminate all costs associated with credit card processing including interchange fees, equipment purchase and maintenance, charge backs and returns, and all legal and technical costs associated with PCI compliance. They have also told us that they have more time to focus on other mission critical tasks as both foot traffic as well as incoming call volumes have decreased dramatically. They have also received rave reviews from their citizens regarding ease of use and increased satisfaction with the process.

What according to you are the differentiating factors that give Government Window a competitive edge?

The approach always has been to build an enterprise platform with a portal that allows for all payments that a government entity receives from their citizens while sharing accurate and timely data to be sure these transactions are secure and timely so that everyone benefits. Our unique business model and merchant relationships will enable us to minimize convenience fees for each transaction, to manage costs and ensure customer satisfaction all leading to increased electronic traffic. This helps to justify our core business principle to government agencies of “No Cost, No Contract.”

What does the future hold for your organization? Any footprint expansion plans or platform enhancement strategies that you can shed light upon?

GW started in Georgia and has organically grown in the state significantly since start-up. We have plans to expand the business out of Georgia and the south-east as we have requests to work with municipalities across the nation. We have a handful of strategic partnerships that provide supporting technical solutions that we will continue to expand as we continue to collaborate and co-brand different initiatives.